Southeast Asia's most-wanted militant at large

INDONESIA

Anthony Deutsch, Associated Press

Published
4:00 am PDT, Tuesday, July 21, 2009

An Indonesian police officer attaches a poster showing images of Noordin Mohammad Top on the windshield of his car during a patrol in Surabaya, East Java, Indonesia, Monday, July 20, 2009. Southeast Asia's most wanted Muslim militant, Malaysian Noordin Mohammad Top, has eluded capture for nearly a decade and is said to be a masterful bomb-maker and aspiring regional commander for al-Qaida. (AP Photo/Trisnadi) less

An Indonesian police officer attaches a poster showing images of Noordin Mohammad Top on the windshield of his car during a patrol in Surabaya, East Java, Indonesia, Monday, July 20, 2009. Southeast Asia's most ... more

Photo: Trisnadi, AP

Photo: Trisnadi, AP

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An Indonesian police officer attaches a poster showing images of Noordin Mohammad Top on the windshield of his car during a patrol in Surabaya, East Java, Indonesia, Monday, July 20, 2009. Southeast Asia's most wanted Muslim militant, Malaysian Noordin Mohammad Top, has eluded capture for nearly a decade and is said to be a masterful bomb-maker and aspiring regional commander for al-Qaida. (AP Photo/Trisnadi) less

An Indonesian police officer attaches a poster showing images of Noordin Mohammad Top on the windshield of his car during a patrol in Surabaya, East Java, Indonesia, Monday, July 20, 2009. Southeast Asia's most ... more

Photo: Trisnadi, AP

Southeast Asia's most-wanted militant at large

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Southeast Asia's most-wanted Muslim militant is said to be a masterful bombmaker and aspiring regional commander for al Qaeda, who has eluded capture for nearly a decade.

Malaysian Noordin Mohammad Top, classified by the U.S. State Department as a terrorism financier since the 2002 and 2005 Bali bombings, is believed to have struck again last week when twin suicide blasts killed seven at the Ritz-Carlton and J.W. Marriott hotels in the Indonesian capital, Jakarta - at least four of them foreigners.

"Noordin is a smart and cunning terrorist," Brig. Surya Dharma, the former head of the Detachment 88 anti-terrorism unit, told the Associated Press. "He wants to show that he deserves to be the commander of al Qaeda here in Southeast Asia."

Noordin's radical ideas took form in the early 1990s at a Malaysian boarding school run by an Indonesian Muslim cleric named Abdullah Sungkar, said Sidney Jones, a prominent terrorism expert. He later joined Southeast Asian terrorist network Jemaah Islamiyah in 1998, after brief training in the southern Philippines.

He fled south to the Indonesian province of Riau in 2002 amid a crackdown on Muslim extremists in Malaysia in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States.

Prosecutors say Noordin orchestrated attacks in Indonesia four years in a row with al Qaeda's support, including the 2002 bombings on the resort island of Bali, the first J.W. Marriott Hotel attack in 2003, the Australian Embassy blast in 2004, and the 2005 triple suicide bombings on restaurants in Bali.

Together, they killed more than 240 people, many of them Western tourists. Police have widely distributed his photo and offered a $100,000 reward for information that leads to his capture, yet Noordin has slipped across borders undetected.

A disagreement over attacking civilians caused a split in Jemaah Islamiyah, and Noordin formed a more violent faction, Tanzim Qaidat al-Jihad, which he reportedly called the "al Qaeda for the Malay archipelago." Its aim is to create a common Muslim state in Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei and the Philippines.

The closest authorities have ever come to seizing him was probably in July 2008, in Palembang, Indonesia, in a raid that netted 10 militant suspects.

"Noordin has shown a talent for escape," said Jones, a senior adviser to the International Crisis Group think tank. "He has narrowly avoided arrest about six times and remains the target of what may be the biggest manhunt in Indonesian history."